Fantasy Island
- February 28, 2018
- by
- Matt
I haven’t written anything on this site for a while now. It’s actually rather difficult to know what to write when confronted with the astonishing spectacle of national self-destruction that is unfolding in front of our eyes. Nowadays hardly a day passes without another reminder that the UK has entered a new political dimension in which...
Boris Johnson’s Big Day Out
- July 23, 2016
- by
- Matt
Politically speaking, schadenfreude tends to be a consolatory emotion, whose pleasures are generally ephemeral and often sharpened by defeat. Even so the humiliation of Boris John last week was worth the price of admission. I’m referring, of course, to the car crash press conference in which Johnson appeared alongside...
Mayday! Mayday!
- July 15, 2016
- by
- Matt
I’ve just returned to Brexitland after a week in the Aragonese Pyrenees with my daughter. During that time we continued to follow the tumultuous events that have convulsed our tormented island: Chilcot; the PLP’s viciously inept coup; the rapid extinction of the wretched Andrea Leadsom and the coronation of Theresa May; the ongoing racism coursing...
Taking Our Country Back: Brexit and the Seeds of Hate
- June 27, 2016
- by
- Matt
There was a time, in the country that so many Brexit voters would like to take ‘back’, when it was commonplace to have signs in the windows of rented accommodation that read ‘no dogs, no Blacks, no Irish. ‘ We have spent decades moving away from the society where such discrimination was semi-respectable; ...
In the gutter with Boris and Nigel
- June 12, 2016
- by
- Matt
I don’t know if you’re enjoying the referendum readers, but I can tell you that I’m not. I can’t think of any national political process that has taken place in my lifetime that I’ve found so constantly dispiriting and depressing on an almost daily level. It now looks at least possible that Brexit...
Truth, Lies, and Politics
- May 14, 2016
- by
- Matt
In Werner Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, a pompous eighteenth-century professor asks the idiot-savant Kaspar Hauser a variant of the classic logical puzzle: You are traveling down a path and come to a fork in the road. One fork leads to a village where everyone tells the truth and the other to a...
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